As far as I’ve seen, the law just says that Poland itself has nothing to do with the camps, but it doesn’t say that there were no camps on it’s territory.
There were camps in many occupied parts of Europe, in USSR and Yugoslavia for example, that doesn’t mean that Poland, USSR and Yugoslavia were involved with the camps. If someone occupies your country and creates camps there to persecute your people (not just Jews, but also Poles, Russians, Serbs, Ukrainians, they were killed as well), then how can that mean that your country is guilty for that?
More surprising to me is that the law penalizes people with up to three years in prison for something which seems like it should fall under freedom of speech. I’ve read that Poland is heading in a more authoritarian direction and this would seem to confirm that. Seriously, prison time for using the wrong words?
I think there’s a lot of bad blood between a lot of Jews and the country of Poland, because I guess a lot of Poles snitched out Jewish citizens to the Nazis. Whether they did it to try to appease the Nazis or because they just hated Jews even more than they hated Nazis, I don’t know. I remember reading Art Spiegelman’s graphic novel Maus and there was a scene where Jews who had survived Auschwitz managed to make it back to their old villages and found that Catholic Poles had moved in and refused to let them return. I remember another scene where a Polish farmer pretended to let Jews hide in his barn, but then snitched them out to the Nazis as soon as they checked in on him.
This shit presumably happened in a lot of other countries in Europe, but I think the largest Jewish population in the world was in Poland at that time, and so a disproportionate number of the Jews who were affected by the Holocaust were from Poland.
But here’s the thing. No country in the world would be free of collaboration with an authoritarian regime that came in and took over. Someone, somewhere, would acquiesce. And it would be more than just one person. In Poland’s case, it’s not a question of if, it’s a question of how much. This law is an attempt to quash open discussion of that.
The problem is that Poland’s law is seen as an attempt to stifle discussion about Poland’s role in fomenting the Holocaust. Some Polish citizens resisted ethnic cleansing, while others took an active part in it.
*"There was the 1941 massacre of hundreds of Jews in rural northeast Poland that, as historian Jan Gross argues, was carried out not under Nazi direction but rather on the initiative of the villagers’ own Polish neighbors. And then there was the killing of dozens of Jews a year after the war’s end in the town of Kielce, again apparently conducted by their Polish neighbors.
Yad Vashem, Israel’s official memorial to Holocaust victims, argues the point is not to assign blame to all Polish people — thousands of whom are recognized by the center as Righteous Among the Nations, or “non-Jews who took great risks to save Jews during the Holocaust” — but rather to preserve open dialogue about a painful, complicated tragedy.
Yad Vashem agreed with Polish lawmakers “that the term ‘Polish death camps’ is erroneous” — but said education programs, rather than “this problematic piece of legislation,” is the proper response to such inaccuracies."*
It’s disturbing that Poland still has a problem with anti-Semitism, evidently including an adviser to its President.
I would encourage you to watch at least parts of the documentary Shoah about the holocaust, especially in Poland. There were if fact, many enthusiastic supporters of the holocaust in Poland including a lot of people who used the opportunity to steal the homes and properties of murdered Jews.
Imagine that a city in the southern US passes a municipal bylaw, saying that you can be arrested (or fired from your job) for teaching that lynching blacks was encouraged by the local government.
It’s a historical truth… no official government policy by any southern town ever said in a printed document that it’s okay to lynch niggers on our land.
See? That proves it!!! They had nothing to do with it!!!
It was just evil outsiders who came from other towns-- who did evil acts on land that happened to belong to certain southern towns.
Are you deeply offended by the idea?
Now multiply your level of hurt by 6 million.
Too rough to be useful IMO. Poland was dismembered by outside powers (the Germans and Soviets) in 1939, who then both committed large scale atrocities on Polish soil, though the Nazi’s the higher body count and the Holocaust per se was a crime of the Nazi’s not the Soviets. What went on in Poland was not under the control of the Polish people as a political entity. There wasn’t even a wholly formed collaborationist regime (as in French complicity in the Holocaust for example), though elements of the administration in the ‘General Government’ area of Poland (not the large parts directly annexed by Germany and USSR) were Polish, like the police.
That’s categorically different from civil atrocities where an intact local representative govt turns its back on victims and won’t enforce the law, as happened at times with racially motivated lynching in the US South (mainly). In those places claiming the atrocities were the work of outsiders would be fundamentally fictional. In Nazi-occupied countries it wasn’t. It was, as was mentioned, a question of the degree of collaboration by local people representing themselves: there will always be some. There’s a different if related question of Polish official antisemitism pre-war but there are many forms of evil short of wholesale murder, and we distinguish them.
A closer analogy related to US racial history would be reluctance of some to put much if any emphasis on the participation of black Africans (in enslaving other black Africans) in the slave trade. People who don’t want to mention that seldom disbelieve significant local involvement in the African slave trade, they just think the emphasis on that should be very subordinate, because more powerful outsiders (Europeans, Arabs) were the prime movers.
I think the Polish law is highly misguided, but I also think my analogy is a better way of understanding the sentiment behind it.
Most countries that suffered under the Nazis (including Germany itself) have laws relating to the Holocaust that in the US would be an unconstitutional restriction on speech.
Well, I’m of the opinion that banning any kind of speech only makes its proponents seem more sympathetic, because then they can say, “see what they do, we’re not even allowed to talk about this subject…they must really be afraid of us.” I’m not saying the Holocaust deniers are right, I think they’re full of shit, but giving them prison terms just makes them look like victims of a draconian law.
Right, but we often hear of this in the context of making Holocaust denial illegal. Not so much on the front of making certain aspects of Holocaust denial mandatory, under threat of prison.
Roughly six million Poles were killed, half of them Jewish.
My American-born Polish-speaking grandfather went to German camps as part of the US 3rd Army. Family lore left me with two impressions: one, the Holocaust was/is a uniquely Jewish tragedy, and a factual one, nothing should ever detract from the magnitude of the evil against this people, and two, the Polish state, and by extension the Polish identity and culture and 1/5 of its population, was systematically erased from the land. Its government was in exile from the beginning.
The acts of individual collaborators and resistors are well-known. They don’t represent the state.
The people who would be punished here are not Holocaust deniers. The people who would be punished are those saying that Poland and Poles were involved in the Holocaust.
I suspect that Romany Gypsies, gays, the physically and mentally disabled plus many other groups of persecuted minorities would not thank you for that statement.
As the UN puts it…
“the Holocaust, which resulted in the murder of one-third of the Jewish people along with countless members of other minorities, will forever be a warning to all people of the dangers of hatred, bigotry, racism and prejudice.”*
Your sentence above could be interpreted as ignoring the extermination of millions of people and laws such as Poland are seeking and the obscene Holocaust denial laws in Europe could easily be turned on statements such as yours.
Absolutely, but it is an event that I think anyone should be free to deny without legal sanction.
and nothing ever will. Then facts are unshakeable. Raving, antisemitic loonies and neo-nazis spouting nonsense are less of a threat to society than anti-free speech laws.
(I’m assuming that you are probably for the Polish laws and most likely for the holocaust-denial laws as well. Apologies in advance if I totally mis-read the tone of your post. )
The Jews were targeted at that time with special attention and depravity, and this is known today as the Holocaust. As long as other victims are given recognition I don’t see how this fact takes something away from other people, including my own. It’s debate material. It’s also kind of beside the point for this, today, because it’s a new twist on a well worn subject and what I posted was a middle ground.
To me it’s a simple truth that the Polish government did not run death camps and I can understand the sense of insult. Polish history is nothing like ours, they have less of an appetite for political malevolence and the hallowed right to babble freely. But it is alarming to want to jail people for saying the wrong things, and it’s really interesting how the people who want this kind of nationalism often look like they wouldn’t mind a Nazi resurgence. So I’m neutral. We will see.
They want to prevent people both in Poland and abroad from using expression such as “the Polish death camps”. A camp be it death or summer, doesn’t need to be owned or organized by the Polish government to be “a Polish [whatever] camp”, it just needs to be in Poland. The kind of bans the Polish government is seeking don’t just say “be careful what you say, remember to distinguish between the actions of some individuals and those of a government which wasn’t even in charge at the time”; they say “this can’t be talked about, period.”
There isn’t a simple dichotomy between the actions of individuals and the actions of a state. To all intents and purposes there was no functioning Polish state during the Nazi occupation. (OK, there was the government-in-exile in London, and Polish units attached to the British forces, and the Home Army conducting some guerilla resistance in Poland. But nothing like a Polish state in control of, or even exercising much influence over, affairs in Poland.)
But there was a Polish community; there was Polish society; there was a Polish nation. And there’s a discussion to be had about the extent to which the Holocaust was facilitated by, or supported by, or simply turned a blind eye to by, the Polish community. This isn’t just a discussion about what individual Poles might or might not have done, but what role Polish attitudes, values, etc played in relation to the Holocaust. And that’s the discussion that the law seeks to suppress.
In fact the law says as much. The principal operative provision says that "anyone who “publicly and against the facts attributes responsibility or co-responsibility for crimes perpetrated by the Third German Reich to the Polish nation or the Polish state” will face prosecution. The law explicitly protects both the Polish state, which it seems to me is hard to argue carries culpability for the Holocaust, and the Polish nation, where that may not be so clear.
(SFAIK, the law doesn’t prevent anyone point out that particular Polish individuals were involved; there’s only a problem if repsonsibility is imputed to the nation or the state.)
I call it out because it shows how easy it is to get into sticky territory with laws such as this. One interpretation of your words could be “Only the Jews were a victim of the holocaust, a by-word for depravity and horror, Oh and by the way some others were killed as well” which seems to minimise the fact that those others were systematically exterminated in exactly the same way and for comparable reasons and motivations. I get the feeling that you think the extermination of the Jews is somehow materially different from the extermination of those other minorities. I can’t find it in me to think that way.
I agree with all of that
And disagree with that. I think it is a bad direction for Poland to take.
To me this is just another example of the shocking juxtaposition of the American view of Free Speech vs. the European view of Free Speech.
Like Cecil mentioned in his column, the right to free speech is considered all but absolute in the States, to the point that the most virulent hate speech is perfectly legal. In Europe, the right to free speech is sacred and inviolable… except when it isn’t.
“the Holocaust may be considered unique for two main reasons: 1) unlike their policies toward other groups, the Nazis sought to murder every Jew everywhere, regardless of
age, gender, beliefs, or actions, and they invoked a modern government bureaucracy to accomplish their goal; and 2) the Nazi leadership held that ridding the world of the Jewish presence would be beneficial to the German people and all mankind, although in reality the Jews posed no
threat. Grounded in a spurious racist ideology that considered the Jews “the destructive race,” it was this idea, more than any other, that eventually led to the implementation of the murderous policy known as the Final Solution.”
I don’t think this is the same issue. Most European countries have limits on hate speech. There are laws, for example, against making verbal attacks against minority groups.
But the Polish law isn’t designed to protect a minority. It’s designed to protect the majority. It bans discussions of Polish collaboration with the Nazis during WWII.